Ted Kooser is a peerless storyteller. He has astute powers of observation and a wonderful command of the language. I’m awed by phrases like calico autumn, or her heart held on a measure of darkness, or blue gloves lifted my glide, or walking on her beautiful legs of lightning. Aren’t these amazing metaphors? His words are a magical juxtaposition of ordinary and extraordinary, of pirouette and boogie.

I had the privilege of hearing Kooser, the United States’ Poet Laureate, read at Oglethorpe University last week, where he was generous, warm, funny, self-effacing, and a surprisingly large presence for such a slight man.

I would share one of my favorite poems from the reading:

Lobocraspis Griseifusa

This is the tiny moth who lives on tears,
who drinks like a deer at the gleaming pool
at the edge of the sleeper’s eye, the touch
of its mouth as light as a cloud’s reflection.

In your dream, a moonlit figure appears
at your bedside and touches your face.
He asks if he might share the poor bread
of your sorrow. You show him the table.

The two of you talk long into the night,
but by morning the words are forgotten.
You awaken serene, in a sunny room,
rubbing the dust of his wings from your eyes.

Ted Kooser touches the inner self to define inspiration, as an experience that might carry a day. He speaks of how personal associations can be the core of inspiration. I so agree. What an amazing man, exploring the fragility and importance of his own life, perhaps even challenging his own mortality in his work, and how sad to hear in another sense the question of his demise. His work—it does inspire me.

In the creative world, we must be storytellers. Story telling is, at its best, about the ordinary. I say it all the time, I know, but I can’t say it enough: Often we look but we just don’t see, and often we listen but we just don’t hear. To have an identity, you need to have a voice; you need to utilize the power of your thinking, to interpret and to speak for yourself. Until you speak for yourself, you will not know how powerful you are. Kooser reminds me of this, in his quiet, ordinary way.

Creatives own a most fabulous opportunity to use our power, for as we transition and alter the way we communicate on the face of the earth—as the model of technology changes from being a mechanical model to a biological model, one where the product of an organism is information—opportunity just grows and grows. I’ll appropriate Kooser’s own words to convey this sense of our history and evolution, this brink we’re on: …but sometimes, in the early hours, we can feel what it must have been like to be one of them, up on our toes, stealing past where others are sleeping, and suddenly able to see in the dark.

Seeing Kooser was also a reminder that as an artist you are charged to respect and regard an ethical acceptance of the world and life as a responsibility, a social responsibility. Kooser seems to be a reasonable man who adjusts himself in the world, rather than an unreasonable man who tries to make the world his. What an amazing man he is, too— direct, blandly caustic, his work disquietingly obedient, if not deferential. He is an absolute stone in my shoe .

I don’t know them yet, but will soon… some of the poets he recommends… Jane Hirshfield, Martin Walls, and Claudia Emerson. These are the ones Kooser imagines will give people fresh ways to look at the world… to take ordinary things and look at them in a new light.

His new book, Delights and Shadows, is well titled, for always within the shadow is the ability to see, and maybe that becomes the delight of it all. He offers his definition for writing poetry, saying, It is a little like fishing… I throw in a line and wait for a little tug. Sounds like the perfect definition for creativity.

Hank.

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